Judge Thokozile Masipa handed down a sentence of five years in prison for Oscar Pistorius’s culpable homicide charge. Watch Masipa hand down her ruling here.

Oscar Pistorius will embrace the opportunity to pay back to society, his uncle Arnold has said on behalf of the family outside the North Gauteng High Court.

“Pistorius’s life is ruined. No one will be deterred by his sentence. Imprisonment is a brutalist response that achieves nothing in such cases,” writes Simon Jenkins in The Guardian today.

Jenkins further argues: The purpose of depriving wrongdoers of their liberty, now that we no longer hang or flog, should be to rehabilitate them and, if not, keep them from further crime. That it should be “retributive”, a mere expression of society’s rage, is primitive theology. It is trotted out when no other reason for imprisonment can be imagined.

Many, such as Rebecca Davis below, have responded on Twitter to Jenkins piece with feelings of anger.

– Agencies

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